New Twilight Saga book gives another vamp her time to sparkle

It’s no Midnight Sun – Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga story written from Edward’s perspective, which was leaked in 2008 – but Meyer’s publisher, Little, Brown for Young Readers, announced today that a new novella is coming on June 5. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner tells the story of a vampire in the “newborn army” (the term refers to her newfound vampirism – the book isn’t actually about baby bloodsuckers). The eponymous character was introduced in Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight Saga.

The initial print run for the 192-page book will be 1.5 million copies, and $1 from all U.S. book sales will go to the Red Cross to help relief efforts in Haiti and Chile. As a thank you to intensely devoted Twihards, the book will also be available for free online from June 7 to July 5.

The manuscript has been kept tightly under wraps so far, although Meyer gave copies to the director and a few cast members of the film adaptation of Eclipse, “so all the parties involved would end up having a really strong foundation for their characters before the cameras started rolling,” Meyer said on her website. After reading it, though, they literally had to burn their copies to keep the story from leaking. Bree Tanner was originally intended to be included in the upcoming The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide as a short story, but it expanded until it would no longer fit in the guide. Meyer said this about the new book:

I began this story a long time ago — before Twilight was even released. Back then I was just editing Eclipse, and in the thick of my vampire world. I was thinking a lot about the newborns, imagining their side of the story, and one thing led to another. I started writing from Bree’s perspective about those final days, and what it was like to be a newborn.

Bookmarks: memories of a writer, whitewashed books, and more

Here at Quillblog, we scour the Web so you don’t have to. Here are some literary links for your perusal:

• Members of the literary community (including Q&Q’s own Steven W. Beattie) share their fond memories of writer and musician Paul Quarrington
• Less than a year after Bloomsbury received backlash for featuring a white woman on the cover of a novel about a black heroine, the publisher has done it again – haven’t they learned anything?
• Here are five ways to improve your writing and concentration (or at least discover some nifty new gadgets and websites)
• The Twilight phenomenon continues to grow (and grow, and grow) – this time, Meyer’s moving into graphic novel territory
• And finally, if folding the corners of book pages drives you crazy, maybe you need what Entertainment Weekly calls the “Cutest. Bookmarks. Ever.”

Bookmarks: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, and more

A few bookish links from across the Web:

• To help you with the holiday shopping season, The Inkwell Bookstore Blog compiles a selection of gifts for the Jane Austenite on your list, including the Pride and Prejudice board game 
• Margaret Atwood picks the top ten gifts to give a budding novelist
• The New Yorker has compiled the top ten books of 1709. The most colourful title? Cotton Mather’s The Golden Curb for the Mouth, a sermon against swearing
•  The Brontë sisters get a little help from the Twilight phenomenon: The Guardian reports that new films of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre are being cast with younger, hotter stars to appeal to Twihards 
• You’ve heard of the proposed Harry Potter theme park. How about a theme park dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels? 
• Bask in “the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning,” because the results of Slate‘s “Write like Sarah Palin” contest are in
• The blogosphere has been buzzing with the best books of the decade lately, so what about the decade’s worst books? 

Bookmarks: Going Rogue mistakes, aliens and werewolves, Xbox Bibles, and more

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox? 

Stephenie Meyer a biter?

According to gossip site TMZ.com, Stephenie Meyer is being accused of stealing parts of the fourth Twilight novel from a book by an author named Jordan Scott. TMZ links to the letter from Scott, detailing the similarities between the two books.

Meyer’s people are denying the whole thing, and while one should always wait for all the facts before drawing a conclusion, the excerpted Meyer scenes in question, seen side-by-side with their supposed sources, really only confirm that all schlocky writing pretty much reads the same.

Jane Austen, sea monsters, and Twilight comix: Enough already!!!

This Quillblogger will confess to finding the premise behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies irresistible: take Jane Austen’s most famous novel (and one of the least likely books ever to be associated with zombies), and drop in scenes of the undead feasting on human flesh. Sadly, the final product, “co-written” by Austen and American humourist Seth Grahame-Smith, failed to live up to the promise of its high concept.

But, 600,000+ consumers can’t be wrong, and the small Philadelphia-based publisher Quirk Books is planning to follow the success of its first mash-up with two (alright, one-and-a-half) new titles in a similar vein. October will see the release of a “Deluxe Heirloom” hardback of P&P&Z, but before that, the company plans to bastardize rework another Austen classic. According to a press release from the publisher, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which is to be released on Sept. 15 (the same day as the scheduled release of another piddling little title that’s sure to create little buzz) “expands the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures.” The new volume, “co-written” with Ben H. Winters, will feature more new material than its predecessor: instead of a ratio of 85:15 Austen-to-new content, the new book’s ratio will be 60:40.

Quirk Books editor Jason Rekulak explains why the publisher decided to go with sea monsters over vampires in the new book:

A couple of publishers are crashing Jane Austen vampire novels that will no doubt capitalize on the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and there were certainly plenty of people who urged me to do the same. But I didn’t want to go out with the one-millionth vampire novel that’s going to be published this year. I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me. Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources – most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants! I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don’t think they will be disappointed.

One group that definitely doesn’t feel that the vampire genre is exhausted is Stephenie Meyer fans. And they have reason to get excited: Entertainment Weekly reports that there is a Twilight graphic novel on the way. This is no doubt going to sew controversy, since the characters’ appearances in the graphic novel are apparently not identical to either the descriptions in Meyer’s novels or the actors who portray them onscreen. Tina Jordan of EW writes:

What’s interesting to me is that it doesn’t look simply like an artist’s rendering of Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson. In fact, the characters seem to be an amalgam of Meyer’s literary imagination and the actors’ actual looks. The description of Edward from biology class: “His dazzling face was friendly; open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. But his eyes were cautious.” And Bella: “I was ivory-skinned … I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete…”

The publication date is still undetermined, so in the meantime, fans can ponder this: Who would win in a fight, Harry Potter, Edward Cullen, or Jane Austen? The comments are open: have at it.

THIS POST CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT HAS BEEN CORRECTED: Quillblog underestimated the popularity of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which has over 600,000 copies in print, not the 60,000 that was originally stated.

Bookmarks: Kundera, de Botton, Ginsberg, and more

Some book-related links:

• “French” author Milan Kundera skips Czech conference on his work.
• Alain de Botton calls for a new literature of the workplace.
• Jonathan Goldstein discovers the lonely, Twilight Zone-esque hell of the signing table.
• Some essential beach reads that don’t exist.
• Happy birthday, Allen Ginsberg.

Twilight sequel script found in trash

It was a blunder worthy of CSIS. In 1999, Canada’s spy agency had egg on its face after top-secret documents were stolen off the back seat of a parked car while the car’s owner attended a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. Then, in 2008, top-secret counter-terrorist documents were discovered in a trash can in downtown Ottawa. Now, in what has to be an equivalent threat to national security (this time in the U.S.), the top-secret script for New Moon, the film sequel to last year’s Twilight adaptation, along with a treatment for the third film in the series, were left in a trash can outside of a St. Louis hotel, where they were summarily discovered by salon owner Casey Ray.

Okay, maybe it’s not as serious as a CSIS security breach (Twilight fanatics are welcome to disagree), but one has to wonder who thought it would be a good idea to dispose of the hottest property in Hollywood by dumping it in a public trash bin.

Fortunately for the sanctity of the film series, Ray ignored her initial impulse to sell the scripts to a tabloid and instead returned them to Summit Entertainment, the production company for the movies. For her honesty, Ray has been invited to attend the premieres of both films.

This is not the first time a Stephenie Meyer property has been inadvertently leaked. Fans may remember the incident last year, in which a partial manuscript for a novel called Midnight Sun was released online, prompting the author to cancel plans to publish the book. The 12-chapter draft was later posted on Meyer’s website.

The search for the next J.K. Rowling

In The Independent, Nicholas Tucker writes that the search is on for a J.K Rowling for the new generation.

He says currently published children’s writers won’t hit the mark (not even Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series, which he says “is too deliberately skewed towards female readers to count as truly universal bestsellers in the way the Harry Potter stories were”), since they have already established themselves in a niche within the kids’ books genre, and says that someone new will have to fulfill the changing demands of kid lit in a way that is almost universally appealing to readers.

In her time Enid Blyton managed this by inventing heroic child characters who always get everything right just when in real life the balance at home and school was moving from adult domination towards children gaining more power. Roald Dahl, another huge commercial success, pushed this tendency further forward into overt fantasy, adding an extra measure of mischievous subversion. Rowling herself continued in this vein – has there ever been a parental couple more worthy of disrespect than Harry’s foster parents Mr and Mrs Dursley? She also located her endlessly resourceful child hero in fantasy land. The chances are that the next best-selling children’s author will do the same thing.

The Twilight guide to battling teen pregnancy

The blog Whiskey Fire has directed us to a nutty column by someone named Dr. Miriam Grossman, who feels that Stephenie Myers’ Twilight series has a lot to say on the subject of teen sex in this era of licentiousness and vice.

Here’s the best part (emphasis added, but hardly needed):

When standards are lowered to these abysmal levels, teens get a green light for behavior they’ll regret. Instead, a girl should be encouraged to wait until her own Edward Cullen comes along, a man who has waited for her as she has for him; who will stay at her side, fight battles for her, and prove himself. “Your scent is a drug to me,” Edward tells Bella, while eyeing her neck with hunger. But he doesn’t give in. As Tanya pointed out, he fights the toughest battle – the struggle against himself – in order to keep her safe and whole. This is what our girls are dreaming about, and this is what they deserve.

Now that’s something you can sink your teeth into.

As Whiskey Fire notes: “It’s true – most young women are very much attracted to young men who think they smell nice but won’t really chomp out their aortas.”